Radical Theatricality

Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage

by Bruce R. Burningham

Publication Year: 2007

Radical Theatricality argues that our narrow search for extant medieval play scripts depends entirely on a definition of theater far more literary than performative. This literary definition pushes aside some of our best evidence of Spain's medieval performance traditions precisely because this evidence is considered either intangible or "un-dramatic" (that is, monologic).

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Radical Theatricality has its roots in a Yale University doctoral
dissertation whose precise year of completion I do not wish to
recall. What I do wish to recall, however, despite the fact that
this project has changed a great deal since my graduate student
days, are the names of the many people to whom I remain so
greatly indebted.

Introduction

The hero of this book—if a scholarly work can be said to have
a central protagonist—is an actor; or, better yet, a series of actors.
But this collective hero does not represent a particular
group of known individuals. This book is neither a biography
nor a history per se, despite the fact that a number of historical
figures will make an appearance. ...

Chapter One: Reinventing Thespis

I begin with a myth of origins. Like all good myths this one
has a hero; like all good myths it owes its interpretive authority
to its own misty antiquity; and like all good myths it lends itself
to infinite re-interpretation. It is the fable of a long-lost
“Golden Age,” ...

Chapter Two: Singers of Tales on Simple Stages

The popular entertainers I invoked in the previous chapter are
not exactly absent in modern scholarly discourse; on the contrary,
the jongleurs as a class of performers have been examined
in any number of literary and historiographical studies
during the last two centuries.1 ...

Chapter Three: Picaresque Actors and Their Theater

One of the most notable features of medieval jongleuresque
performance is its connection to that of the Roman mimus, the
Teutonic scôp, and others, whose performative practices continued—
modified to be sure, but unabated—for hundreds of
years after the fall of the Roman Empire. The mechanism that
allowed for this ongoing performance tradition, ...

Chapter Four: “Corralling” the Jongleuresque

Criticism of poetic influence has a long and venerable history
in the Western literary tradition and exists in various forms. The
most common of these are examinations of direct influence that
attempt to trace links between texts by locating the sources one
author has used in the formation of his or her own work. ...

Chapter Five: Playwrights and the Actorly Text

Throughout this book I have argued that the genuinely theatrical
nature of the jongleuresque tradition has been undervalued
by many modern critics precisely because our historiographical
models have been inordinately informed by the literary
legacies of the Thespis myth. ...

Conclusion

I return here at the end to the Thespis myth and to its application
to the so-called rebirth of Western drama. We are told that
this rebirth occurred not only within the physical confines of
the Church, but also within the interpretive confines of the
Mass sometime in the ninth century. ...

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